Rioters, what's your view on Lucian's state as a caster ADC?
Let me start off by saying Lucian has a special place in my cold carry heart. He (and soon enough, the lovely Jhin) really reward dealing with your enemies in style, which is something I love above everything else. I mean, I main Darius too, messy raw brute force is awesome to experience, but being a glass cannon that kills in style or dies is my personal niche.
Now let's get on to the real thing. Lucian, according to Rito, is a highly mobile burst caster-marksman. And I agree with that. That's what he should be. Fragile, relatively short-ranged but very speedy and doing staggering amounts of damage as long as ke can keep dancing around the target. The problem is that, well, he's not all that. His mobility is strong, with a dash on a low cooldown and a pretty OK speed boost too, **however his burst/caster marksman role is, regrettably, sub-par. ** Graves _still _ has better burst even if that's not exactly his job, and what hurts me the most, many non-caster ADCs have more combat-oriented abilities while Lucian has only his Q.
And let's face it: Piercing Light is bad. The scaling is 120% bonus AD, which starts falling off really hard when Lu gets some good crit-related items since it doesn't crit. It has a flat 0.35 second delay which further nullifies any reason to use this ability in the mid-late game except to proc your passive, and using this without your passive actually makes you lose quite a lot of DPS. Not exactly amazing, for a "caster ADC" whose skills should remain relevant throughout the game. And on top of that, it's NOT a pure skillshot so I can hit it or miss it and have nobody to blame, but it's neither a targeted ability that I can know it will land on the target. Instead it's a half-assed semi-skillshot that I can only target and pray the enemy doesn't dash -- and if they do, there's nothing I could have done. Counterplay.
Lucian's W, now, apart from giving some nice flat MS and the occasional last-hit, is basically a missing ability from his kit. You throw it at the enemies when you kite or chase just to be done with it. For a "caster" and "burst" marksman this ability is awfully not-damaging, seeing how it's the only other basic ability that does any damage, and it's all in all a terribly forgettable ability. You'd think that Lu's evil-burning ancient relic pistols of silver fire could do something better than this...
His E is cool. At 45% CDR proccing your passive 2 times on enemy champions resets it completely which is, well, nice, although Vayne gets to do that every 2 seconds without needing to go through all that in the meantime, and she also kinda gets more damage than he gets from his double shot. But that's OK, Lucian's little dash brings his mobility up to snuff and adds a little damage boost to his next attack so I don't complain.
And finally, the Culling. Oh, the Culling. One of the coolest ultimates in the game that has consistently been used as a glorified wave clearing ability. The Culling hurts me. Wanna know why? Because it does 1500 (+600% AD) physical damage. "That's not that bad", you say. Well yeah, it's not. But it's almost impossible to land every shot onto a good enemy and even then, any tank can just tank it all for 150 damage.
Then there's Miss Fortune's ulti. That one does 1200% AD. It requires absolutely no prediction skills and certainly nothing like landing a constant barrage of skillshots for 2 seconds straight while sidestepping tanks and minions. Wanna know how at how much AD her ulti surpasses the Culling in damage? **It's at 250+ AD. ** MF's ulti is stronger than the Culling when she gets 2 AD items. Wanna know what else? Hers can also crit for 30+% more damage per bullet. Wanna know what else? Hers can't be blocked by minions or tanks. Wanna know what else? Hers hits all units within a gigantic AoE. The range, in fact, is the same as Lucian's ulti.
Some have argued that Lucian can move during his ultimate so that makes it better. "Better how?" I ask. Sure, I can sidestep a skillshot coming at me. And lose 60% of the ulti's damage in the meantime. "But MF is an easy target while Lucian can kite", they say. Have you ever tried to close in on an ulting MF if you can't circle around her ulti? Yeah, you're all gonna die. Have you ever tried to close in on an ulting Lucian? One member of your team may even drop to half HP.
#People are using the Culling for waveclear again, dammit, while Miss Fortunes get multikills left and right with their ults that they simply click and wait.
On top of all that, MF passively gets MORE MS boost than Lucian gets (she gets 100 from Strut, Lucian 80 from Ardent Blaze), she has an AoE slow, a decent attackspeed steroid, the easiest last hitting - trading tool in the game (since hit + Q on a minion in front of the enemy nukes them for 60% HP at all stages of the game). She certainly doesn't miss her Q anywhere as often, or lose damage when using it.
And now Jhin's ulti is better than Lucian's too (the last shot alone can rival the entire Culling's damage).
#So I ask Riot: ##What are your thoughts on the state of Lucian?
- His Q does not keep up in any phase of the game after perhaps the laning phase, let alone render him an AD caster. He loses damage when using it in most phases of the game if we don't count in his passive.
- His W is a glorified passive that does no damage, leaving a "burst marksman" with one (bad) offensive ability while "area denial adc" Cait has more damage in her kit than that (do I need to list the damages and scalings on her headshot > E > Q > heashot combo? I think not.) MF's strut gives constantly more MS than Lucian's W gives for 6 seconds which has nowhere near 100% uptime until much, much later on.
- His E is all his mobility but it feels nice to use.
- And his R is inferior to at least 3 other ADC ultimates in almost every way, and his basic kit doesn't exacltly balance it out in terms of power. You do a single target hard-to-land weaker MF ulti but hey, you can run around while doing it! #worth
So, is Lucian gonna be left to die slowly once more? Yes, he is popular now and he can carry decently, but essentially after the Marksman update dust settled, he just got a few nerfs and that's it. He's worse than others in his own niche, his basic damage ability is just bad in all ways (low damage, can miss without it being the player's fault, the delay causes you to lose DPS since the damage falls off so hard) and hell, it's just one ability, and his ulti is high risk, low reward.
Can't his Q become able to crit? Can't it scale with attackspeed so the delay gets negated by late game? Can't his W become a real damaging skill apart from the MS boost? Can't his R become able to crit since it's unreliable single target damage, and MF's R already can and it's a classic unblockable AoE DoT!?
##Can't his passive and his ulti ramp up in damage when you hit consecutive shots on the same target? MF likes to hit everything and her passive rewards swapping targets, so why can't Lucian's passive get stronger and stronger as he guns down a single target, and same with his ulti?
Sorry for the long post but I wanted to point out his weak spots, compare him to other ADCs and propose some changes.
I would _really _ appreciate an answer from a designer, for once, because no matter how much I trust Riot's decisions, this just feels unfair.
Excuse the salty tone. ##I'm just frustrated that Lucian is getting nothing again while he's clearly problematic in almost every aspect -- and despite his pick rate he isn't even that strong (50% win rate), while Miss Fortune is sitting on an almost 55% win rate (54,8% to be exact) and all she gets is irrelevant nerfs to her E and passive.
Really, really looking forward to some insight, N0rth Wind.
